The increasing number of personal electronic devices in the world and their formidable computational and networking capabilities creates new and greater stresses on communications networks. For example, a study performed in early 2013 estimated that over 180 million smartphones were in use in the United States. A software bug or malicious code that is replicated across multiple electronic devices can saturate or bring down major networks and services if the bug or code causes the devices to repeatedly and persistently submit requests to particular services. In addition, if a popular service experiences a brief outage, when the service comes back online a huge number of devices may simultaneously attempt to reconnect to the service. This sudden, heavy load can impose significant stresses on communication networks. While the service may protect itself from sudden heavy loads or other unusual activity with denial of service actions, this does not protect intermediary networks and third party services from the impact of a heavy traffic load.
This document describes methods and systems that are directed to solving at least some of the problems described above, and/or additional problems.